An R&B star with an international reach has announced an ambitious plan to build a $6 billion solar city off the Senegalese coast.
Akon, who was born in Senegal and whose real name is Alioune Badara Akon Thiam, said he hopes the city, located 60 miles south of Senegal’s capital, Dakar, will provide a boost in tourism for the West African nation.
“As you come in from America, or Europe, or anywhere in the diaspora, and you feel like you want to visit Africa, we want Senegal to be your first stop,” Akon said at a news conference to promote the city on Monday.
The city will be named after Akon, and the musician said architect Hussein Bakri will design the city based on Wakanda, a fictional country that is central to the plot of Marvel Studios’s 2018 superhero hit Black Panther.
The announcement comes only days after Chadwick Boseman, who starred as the lead character in Black Panther as well as several other Marvel movies, died at age 43 after a yearslong battle with colon cancer.
Akon, who found worldwide success in the early 2000s with hits such as Locked Up and Smack That, said one of the motivations behind building the environmentally friendly city is so that it can act as a destination for African Americans who are eager to visit Africa.
“I wanted to build a city or a project like this that will give them the motivation to know that there is a home back home,” Akon said.
Work on the project will begin in 2021, with the first phase set to be completed by 2023. Akon said the city will be built on 500 hectares and house up to 300,000 people within a decade.
